


Adventures in the Danger Room

by KittyViolet



Category: Excalibur (Comic), New Mutants, Wolverine and the X-Men (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/F, Married Couple, Restraints, Rope Bondage, Sound Effects, Technological Kink, Vibrators, Watching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 17:39:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Technology can be your friend. With benefits.





	1. Stay on the Horse

**Author's Note:**

> Chapters 1-3 take place between Wolverine and the X-Men (volume one) numbers 35 and 36 (i.e. just before Battle of the Atom). Chapter 4 takes place... much later.

The whole mansion is dangerous: that’s a joke but it’s also an intentional design element, built to take the pressure off whoever is operating the Danger Room, and to keep the students a bit on their guard. (Logan, who is old enough to have seen all the Pink Panther movies, says it’s supposed to work like in the Pink Panther movies, except not virulently racist.) But there is also a Danger Room in the Jean Grey School for real. You can sign up for it, just like you can for the basketball court and the zero gravity chamber. Rachel Grey has.

“I told you," Grey says to Kitty (she meant to say “asked you”) “we could really use an hour in the Danger Room together. I wanted to try something out.”

“OK,” Kitty says, almost dropping her cup of coffee. “Do I need to change?” She’s just met with Remy to talk about classroom safety after another episode of breaking-all-the-windows-in-the-room; multiple kids with weather control powers had chosen Remy’s How to Weaponize Household Objects elective, and it was going extraordinarily well (from Remy’s perspective and the kids’) or not so well (if you had to handle repairs). Before that she had yet another meeting with the New York State inspectors, which explained the rather prim outfit: button-down shirt with lace collar, not-quite-visible cami, tan muslin skirt with a white slip built into the skirt, black leggings (not tights) underneath, a series of clean-lined bracelets on one arm. Also glasses on a chain, not bifocals and not regular glasses, but micro-focus lenses, designed by Hank to allow delicate hardware work. A switch in the back turned them into plain glass, suitable for the moments (like inspector meetings) when Kitty has to look much, much older than she feels.

Grey looks Kitty up and down, then looks at her own black leotard, black boots, black nylon jacket. “You’ll be fine. I just want you to help test a couple things out.” (She pauses.) “Finish the coffee first, though.”

Kitty slurps it all up, then puts the cup—part of a tea service; part of her headmistress costume, really—on a shelf. Something extrudes and takes the cup back into the wall for later dishwashing.

“I keep thinking that’s Warlock, whenever that happens.” Rachel Grey pauses. “It’s not secretly Warlock, is it?”

Kitty smiles. Grey puts her palm to the palm-print reader, her eyes to the iris-reader, and the Danger Room door slides open. She hasn’t had fingerprints since she was fourteen, but she has the same eyes.

“OK. So the help I need, if you’ve got a bit—it might take up to an hour; you ready?” Kitty nods. “The help is with some multiple attack machinery I wanted to try out with us before it gets used in my Outer Space Survival class. Might need some privacy, though. I’m locking the door. Can you get down into the room? No, not that way.”

Kitty—as Grey knows—has just barely stopped herself from phasing through the control room, into the Danger Room itself, which would have disrupted half the mechanisms in the building. Instead Kitty opens the side door, opens the trap door, and climbs down the metal stairs to the Room itself, in an old school configuration: no conventional furniture, no simulations, just overlapping metal panels all over the walls and floor, and what looks like a pommel horse, with handles.

(When did Kitty start thinking of Rachel Grey as “Grey”? Hard to say, but it’s a good habit by now; there were, like, four Rachels at the University of Chicago, and G-d knows how many “Summers” Kitty has had to meet, and argue against, by now.)

Kitty can hear and see Grey, but from the control room window, from below, through her microphone. She kind of enjoys looking up to her. “Take the handles,” Grey says. “And start looking out. You’re in the Danger Room now and it’s definitely turned on.”

Energy pulses—the kind that could knock you out, or smash equipment, or give you quite a bruise—are coming at Kitty, literally right and left, from turrets that pop from the walls. Kitty phases to let one pass through her, then dodges another as she sees the gun-robot take aim. She ducks under the pommel horse, then leaps over it, phasing as she does so to let a third blast pass right through her ribs.

“Stay on the horse,” Grey says through the microphone. “This is a test of agility and resourcefulness with new equipment.”

What’s new about the equipment? Kitty wonders. The test looks so very much like the ones she used to watch Kurt and Scott and Ororo put one another through, when she first came to the Xavier School. But it’s a test she can pass. She nearly stands up on the horse, crouches down, grabs hold of both handles, shifts her shoulders left to let another energy projectile by. If they get any faster she’s not going to dodge them anymore, just rely on her phasing power. Which she knew how to do anyway. What was the point?

Also, why do this exercise in these clothes? The tan skirt—very useful for headmistressing!— had already nearly torn itself in two when Kitty dodged to the left, and that top, while comfortable enough, was maybe a bit too stiff for ideal battle gear. Why wouldn’t you do this in costume? Or in sweat pants and a Star Wars T-shirt? (Kitty owns so many of those it’s a running joke how expendable they are.)

Another fuzzy, glowing energy projectile whizzes through Kitty’s immaterial thighs. “Stay on the horse,” Grey projects. Kitty realizes that she isn’t able to stay on the horse as long as she concentrates this hard on remaining completely phased. A fully phased Kitty will drift, inches one way, inches another, since she doesn’t weigh anything (there are reasons why she doesn’t just float away when she’s phased, but they would require a blackboard full of equations). 

If Kitty wants to hold on to something for real, to stay exactly in place, for a while, she has to stay solid enough to make contact with, in this case, the anomalous and apparently indestructible piece of gymnastics equipment. Another grey energy pulse zips and zings against it, leaving a kind of soot stain on the housing.

“Go! Go! they’re coming faster! what will you do? Is there a pattern? Stay on the horse!” Why is Grey smiling? What’s the solution to this combat conundrum? If Kitty goes solid she won’t be able to dodge the blasts. (Some of the blasts aren’t blasts any more; they appear to be high-speed rubber rods!) But if she stays phased she might sink slowly into the horse.

If she stays entirely phased, that is. If there’s a pattern to the projectiles she might be able to phase only the part of her body she needs to phase, while keeping the rest of her body solid. Is there a pattern? There seems to be…. Kitty gets immaterial just long enough to see that the rods have slowed down, a bit, and that they’re moving in sequence, top to bottom and left to right, the same pattern over and over: top to bottom, left to right, and again. 

"Take my glasses!" Kitty yells, flinging the lenses across the Danger Room. Grey smiles (Kitty feels sure that her friend is smiling) as a thin hook on a pole drops down from the ceiling to catch the glasses and take them to safety.The pulses keep coming. Kitty stays on the horse, holding on to it with both hands, as a gymnast would, then turning her body so that she’s riding it almost as she would a real horse. She phases first her head and shoulders, then her breasts, ribs, upper torso, then her lower torso, hips, thighs, then her knees and heels, and then her head and shoulders again. 

It’s working, although the tan skirt and the slip inside it have now been ripped in half by Kitty’s maneuvers on the horse: she shoves the remains of the skirt in between her legs and then in back of her, keeps reading the room, keeps seeing the rhythms of the dangerous pulses coming at her, with their assortment of rubber (or something) rods. The white shirt has come untucked from her leggings. It’s a good thing she wore the unstable molecules bra. She can feel sweat pool, not unpleasantly, between her breasts: it's a workout, not just a way to test equipment. But why? what's it for?

Kitty ducks her head, remembers she doesn’t have to duck, just has to keep phasing the parts of her body in and out of solidity in the same rhythmic pattern, and she can stay on the horse forever. Head, ribs, hips, thighs, knees, head, ribs, hips, thighs…

Turned sideways on the horse, she can only see Grey out of the corner of her eye, but she can still hear her friend through the microphone. “Good rhythm. You’ve got this. Slowing it down a little now. Stay on the horse. Don’t let them take you off your game.” Something’s changed in Grey’s voice, Kitty thinks: it’s less serious, more of a tease? Head, ribs, hips, thighs… 

Are the pulse charges warming her up as they pass through her, even though she’s immaterial each time, wherever they hit? If not, why does she feel warmer inside? It might be the heat of exertion. It definitely started when she realized that it was a workout, that Grey set her up for it, that Kitty really could solve this problem, not having been in the field for a bit. Head, shoulders, ribs, thighs, hips, knees. Grey knew how to do something quick to get Kitty to feel in charge of her body, to feel… warmer....

OH. Was Grey smiling? Kitty has started to smile. Head, shoulders, ribs, thighs, hips… Grey had figured out how to get Kitty to rip her own prim skirt in two, hike up the slip, move up and down on a horse, and pay close attention to the rhythmic motion of her body, and Kitty, being Kitty, didn’t even realize what Grey had in mind until the game was already very much underway. 

“Going to slow it down just a bit now: stay focused! Stay on the horse!” Grey says, and Kitty is surely focused now, though she's not going to tell Grey she's figured out what the game is: both of her hands stay in front of her, but she’s moving—head, shoulders, ribs, hips—back and forth on the horse, back and forth, and the phasing itself, turning solid and then not-solid and then coming back, is doing something very special (as Grey must have known that it could) to Kitty’s rib cage, her belly, her inner thighs (those leggings are very comfortable, they do not chafe at all), the skin between her inner thighs, her outer lips, her clit…

The phasing itself, in its rhythms, its out and in sensations, the brushstroke of self-erasure and the downstroke of becoming solid again…. there’s nothing sexually exciting about making your whole body disappear (though that can be a conseqeuence when Kitty gets super excited), but there is something exciting about making the sensitive skin on your sides disappear and then come back, your hips come back, your clit go away and come back, go away and come back, in a regular rhythm, slowing it down and speeding it up, and knowing that someone—someone you’re into, someone whose body you know very well from your days in a lighthouse together—that someone is definitely watching you.

“Stay on the horse,” Grey says from her window. Surely she’s looking closer and closer at Kitty using the Danger Room’s special cameras? Or maybe she doesn’t need to look; maybe all she needs is Kitty’s face, lips slightly parted, a few more beads of happy sweat running down her sternum, as her legs spread wider apart on the horse as the phasing continues, in rhythm, always in rhythm. “Keep going.” Her inner lips part when she phases that part and only that part of her body, and they're open, soft, attentive, a bit more each time she turns her thighs solid again. Why had she not discovered how to do this before, years before, in the lighthouse with Grey, or before that, in a bedroom she shared?

Grey must know her friend has found her rhythm as she scrunches the now-destroyed skirt behind her, rubbing herself against the laws of physics, the material of reality, and against the equipment too. Kitty's eyes are wide. Whatever danger the Danger Room holds no longer feels dangerous, it's just a harmless background to the rhythm she has. That's what it's like to be an X-Man, to have friends like Grey, to trust them with your life, with your body, with what your body wants, to watch and see what your body wants.... Head and shoulders and ribs and thighs, it’s delicious, it’s dangerous, it’s agony, the clit that comes and goes and comes again and won’t come, not quite yet, and wants to come, but instead comes and goes, in rhythm, now she’s wetting herself, she’s wetter between her legs than the leggings could ever absorb, can she come, she could, if she let herself, but Grey keeps telling her to keep at it, and the room won’t let her stop, head and shoulders, ribs, thighs—


	2. Break an Egg

“Change of plans,” Grey announces, and the barrage of rubber rods and pulses stops, the pommel horse sinks to the floor, and Kitty is wrapped, before she can think to stand up—or, much better, lie down and take care of herself—in a kind of spider-thread, so thick it’s less a web than a cocoon. The spider-silk, or whatever it is, comes up to her armpits and clavicles, and fills up, less silk than quick-setting foam, all the way between her legs. She's totally covered in it, except for her head. It's like-- no, it is-- being inside an egg, like a chick or a gosling that can't hatch from an egg.

Disconcerting isn’t the word. Shocking isn’t the word. There isn’t a word. It’s a physical shock, part fight or flight reflex, part exhilaration, part relaxation—at least the pulses have stopped—and part confusion: what is Kitty trapped in? Where did it come from? Can she get free?

How should it feel for her to try to fight her way free of something like this, in a combat training situation, when a moment ago all she wanted, almost all she could think about, was how to touch herself and get free, feel free, get herself where she had to be, in a very different way? 

Is she still turned on? She definitely is; she's still breathing hard, too. How can she even think about that now? But she does. She wobbles and squirms. The foam feels lighter than cotton, but the shell around it isn’t going to crack, and rolling around on the floor with it does nothing at all, except that Kitty almost bruises her ear. She’s truly stuck in it.

Or would be, she thinks, if she weren’t Shadowcat, Kitty Pryde. She can simply phase. Is it a trap? It’s too easy. What could Rachel Grey have been thinking?

But of course she can’t phase through it. The chemical here is immune to her powers, or nearly so. Maybe there’s Breakworld metal involved (a depressing prospect for all sorts of reasons). Maybe some kind of unstable molecules, or power dampeners, or who knows? But she can’t just use her powers to walk away.

“Now that we’ve completed your first exercise,” Grey says through the microphone, “I’d like to try out another new capacity for the Danger Room, one that I’ve designed especially for you, since we still have the time.” Is Grey smirking? “I think you can figure out how to free yourself from the egg. I want to watch you try.” She called it an egg. Was her use of the noun a clue? Back in Scotland, Kitty and Rachel owned and shared a few devices called eggs...

Kitty wiggles and rolls. The material isn’t totally inflexible on the inside, nor it is brittle; it yields if you move, a little, and if Kitty phases just right and then solidifies she can make more room for herself inside the egg, so it's temporarily no longer flush with her body. (That body is not quite flush with its clothes, at this point: her bra is still on but the hooks in the back are undone, and her leggings are still a wet mess.) And the silky-foamy material turns out to behave almost like a memory foam, but faster, within its thick shell; if Kitty wiggles back and forth, moves back and forth, inside the big egg, the foam will recede and then coalesce and come back. She’s no closer to cracking the shell than she was a few minutes ago, but she’s doing some experiments, her hands trapped and separate inside the shell, but moving, her thighs and knees unable to touch each other, each immersed in the foam, but moving, letting the foam recede and come back.

If Grey is still watching (and not using any telepathy) all she’s going to see is Kitty’s changing facial expression, from puzzlement to pleased surprise and back to puzzlement again. “I’m watching,” Grey says, as if she had been reading Kitty’s mind. “I know you can figure out how to work this thing. I’ve seen you do it before. I want to watch this time.”

“I can see what you feel,” Grey nearly whispers, and she’s right. What Kitty has figured out—and she closes her eyes in order to study the concept—is that she can move the thick foam back and forth, back and forth, rubbing herself against it, letting it push against her where she wants it to push against her, until it’s a source of very obvious pleasure, obvious on her face: if she’s going to be stuck in this thing she’s going to have fun with it, and she’s going to let Grey see. 

And then it clicks into place again. Of course. Grey might be testing new equipment—mechanical then and chemical now—but the whole thing is a ruse. What Grey really wants is just to watch Kitty get off. It's a safe way for Grey to get off herself, without raising any questions about how intimate, at the moment, they truly are; it's a kind of elaborate, and lovely, prank, one that would not make sense with anyone Kitty has met except for the two of them. And Grey had always liked to watch. “You can watch,” Kitty near-shouts, “but I’m not sure there’s much to see.”

The next thing she figures out—she imagines Grey watching her the moment she figures it out—is that when she phases and then turns solid again inside this foamy egg, the egg’s material starts to vibrate. It’s something like piezoelectricity: the energy of her phasing becomes vibration, mechanical energy, in the hard foam. Which fills up the space between her legs, and around her belly and sides and ribs and nipples and clavicles and around her thighs and back to her inner lips and inside her leggings and…

“Better living through chemistry,” Kitty whispers. “Or is it materials science. God, I love materials science.” Worst case: Grey is waiting to watch her come and then has a way to get her out. Best case: making herself come, while Grey watches, is, somehow, the get out. Kitty rocks herself gently inside the egg, balancing herself so she won’t tip over, and closes her eyes and lets all the foam that surrounds her vibrate, now faster, now slower, now faster as it solidifies, almost inside her, slightly inside her, pushing up on the crotch of the leggings. 

Kitty thinks about Grey, and about other people too, about all the people who let her feel most alive, the people who fit with her: about Ilya and their twin beds, about Grey in the lighthouse, about Piotr after he came back to life, and she feels—who does she feel?—as if her beloved could reach inside and unwrap her. The vibrations are shifting inside her, gently penetrating like a beloved's fingers, parting her lips, then receding, then entering, harder, as she lubricates herself and phases and turns solid and the foam vibrates again and enters her body, a proxy for lovers, for Grey, for Ilya, for Grey, for the lover that she can take into herself— she might be as wet as she has ever been, she’s a lazy stream, a rivulet, a river, she needs to keep something between her legs to contain her, otherwise she’ll dissolve—

and she does dissolve, closing her parted legs as her mouth opens and her eyes close, surely Grey must be watching, look, Grey, I did it, I solved your egg! please come let me out, clean me up, I’m everywhere and nowhere as the pressure on my lips forms and abates, and now I’m flooded inside and this is embarrassing, but it’s also delicious, I trust you to watch me, I love that you want to watch me, here, see me flood myself, see me dissolve, as my legs close back again--

Kitty projects these thoughts so hard that she almost wishes Grey broke their rule and just read her mind, though the Danger Room protocols would make that difficult even if Grey tried, and probably she’s just sitting back in the comfortable operating chair in the control room with the broad smile that so rarely appears on her face—

and the egg and its shell have in fact dissolved, quickly, around her, letting her down gently like a pillow and then like a deflating balloon, as shell and silky rubbery foam become bubbles and traces and pearls of half-melted residue, like when a solvent hits Styrofoam.

Did coming dissolve the egg? Did getting wet? (Kitty is blushing, hard, because she’s so revealed—she’s on her back in the Danger Room wearing nothing but wet, tattered leggings and a half-open bra; of course that’s exactly what Grey wanted to see.)

Did Grey dissolve the egg by pushing a button? What was up with this experiment, anyway? What was Grey truly trying to test?

Should Kitty even ask? Grey climbs down the wall’s ladder into the Danger Room and rushes to her friend’s side to help her get up, pecks her check, then kisses her full on the lips, then takes her under one shoulder as if she had just been through, not a sexual experiment, but an ordeal. 

Kitty follows Grey back up the ladder and into the control room and then sinks into a couch. She’s not quite ready to ask Grey what Grey was thinking, so she asks a safer question. “Can you explain the chemistry in that foam egg?”

“It’s definitely experimental,” Grey deadpans. “But I know it retains its structural integrity until it’s challenged by excessive vibrations and by moisture combined with certain secretions. Further experiments may be required.”

“I think I know another test subject.” Kitty stares back at her friend. “But we’re not conducting any more tests until at least”—Grey hands Kitty a clipboard—“tomorrow morning. And I’m going to need something immediately first if the experiments are to continue.” Grey looks right at Kitty, Grey’s black jacket smoothing itself under Grey’s hand.

“Go into the closet in my office,” Kitty continues, “and bring me a black vest, a white blouse, and a dark skirt. I have to teach in half an hour, and look what you did to my clothes.”

“Look what _you_ did,” Grey responds.

“Fair enough,” Kitty says. “I might do it again.”


	3. How Does That Sound?

Grey looks exhausted. “I’m exhausted,” she says, flopping onto a rec room couch. Kitty just stares back into her eyes, frowns and shrugs, as if to say: I can’t read your mind, but I can read _you._

Kitty might also be thinking (Grey tunes in, discreetly, and now Grey knows she is thinking): that’s what comes with being a full time teacher. But not everybody teaches such physical subjects. Paige does art. Kitty does history and CS (and most of the admin). Rachel Grey teaches non-telepaths how to survive in space, and telepaths how to control their scary powers: both require demonstrations, and workouts.

Grey closes her eyes and telekinetically brings herself a remote control. There’s a baking show on. (There is always a baking show on.)

Kitty stands up. “As much as we all love baking” (Kitty does not love baking, though she does love it when friends can relax) “I think there’s one more Danger Room sequence you need to inspect this evening, if you can.”

Grey looks back at Kitty. She’s so tired it takes her a couple of seconds to realize what Kitty probably means; she almost says no, and then she says yes. “I will need to see how these brioches come out first, though.”

Of course. There’s nothing like The Great Canadian Televised Baking Contest; sometimes Kitty wonders whether she’d like it more if she could watch it with Alpha Flight. Maybe with Northstar, who would no doubt snark at the winning contestant: Jean-Paul could have done it better….

Now Kitty has time to prepare. By the time Grey descends to the control room, the Danger Room itself has microphones and baffles and spherical speakers suspended in midair; it’s as if somebody started to build a model space station in that room, and then got bored.

“We’re ready,” Kitty says. They are not dating. They haven’t been dating since the lighthouse. They may never be dating. They are colleagues and friends and sometimes things just… happen. Sometimes they talk about the things when they are about to happen, to make sure they are the right things, but there’s never been planning, or schedules, or commitment. Or exclusivity. If Kitty were ever to get serious with Bobby, there would have to be a talk. But that certainly hasn’t happened yet.

Does this count as planning, though? Kitty has something planned. As Grey, in full fighting costume, descends into the Danger Room she realizes that it’s quite hot, and quite humid, there. And the humidity is increasing. Also the room tone feels off: it’s super-echoic, almost like being inside some sort of digital post-production effect for an xcmpop record. xcmpop was the last big pop sensation in Grey’s timeline before things got bad and she had no time for pop radio. Has Kitty somehow got hold of her previous life’s greatest hits?

“Are you about to play me a Juliette Wreck song?” Grey asks, and the sound of her asking rings and ricochets around the hot room. 

“What was that?” Kitty asks through the microphone.

“I said, are you about to play me Juliette Wreck? I didn’t know you liked them!” Grey is ecstatic but also confused. It’s not like their songs came back through the timestream with her. But there’s something very high-tech going on with the soundscaping here…

“If you feel like a hot wreck,” Kitty says, perhaps mis-hearing her friend on purpose, “you can do something to make yourself cooler.” A full combat suit built for space or underwater would have self-cooling pipes. This one doesn’t. Grey simply unzips it instead: she’s in underwear (lacy, opaque, silver-grey) and a cami (also silver-grey), and kinetic socks: the unstable molecules in the socks interact with the uniform’s boots, making costumed X-Men slightly harder to knock off balance.

It’s a good thing about the socks, too: a blast of echoing sound nearly knocks Grey right on her butt, but she manages a controlled descent. Now she’s propped on her elbows on the Danger Room floor—a soft part of the floor, as if Kitty had programmed in some cushions—looking around for the source of the sound, adrenaline dialed up a bit, alert to potential invisible threats.

But there are no threats, other than the echo itself, which is getting more intense, more focused; neither so deep as to feel like a weapon, nor so high it could signal only mutant hearing, the song is turning into less an xcmpop beat and more like…. some other kind of beat. It’s regular, it’s buzzing, it’s got some force to it, it’s pushing her gently down, it’s thickening the air around her, almost as if she were caught—there are shreds of her voice in it, still, asking about Juliette something—in solid, invisible manacles…

“Where did you learn to do this?” Grey manages to ask, as the sound pushes her farther down, off her elbows and slowly onto her back.

“The basics came from Sean, long, long ago. But the rest of this sequence I taught myself.” That explains why Kitty had an acoustics and recording manual on her nightstand, was it two weeks ago? (When was the last time they shared a bed and actually slept in it? Two weeks ago?)

Now Grey’s hearing can sort out the frequencies better. Kitty is using solid sound to keep her immobile. She considers fighting back, fighting to sit up, makes a token effort and realizes that she really doesn’t want to do that. She lets the sound waves—baritone, second alto, and a steady buzzing all around the edges of her hearing—push her back down.

“You can resist, or not resist. But these are waves of solid sound,” Kitty says. “They’re powerful. They are so powerful.” The word “resist,” twice in a row, means Kitty knows they’re in a safeword situation, and also that there’s no way this is a combat test, or a test of anything except Kitty’s ability to do for Grey what Grey can do for her: and if it’s not working, Grey knows just what she can say.

Is it working? What is “it”? So far it’s diffuse pressure, all over her body, then more intense, almost a melody, waves of sound in succession, massaging—almost shoving, but it’s still a massage—her shoulders, stroking her hips, then gathering up and separating again to push apart her thighs. Grey is no Daredevil, but she does have heightened senses: she can almost see the interference patterns, positive and negative, the way that the sound plays and presses around her—what kind of dials and faders has Kitty rigged up? 

“You win this year’s Oscar,” Grey manages to say, through the sound waves, almost unable to speak, “for sound design in a feature f—“

Thent the waves start to crash over her: waves of sound, alto, tenor, baritone, white noise, woodwind, backwards guitar, not so loud in the audible range as to distract her but somehow made solid around her, all the echoes pressing up on her clavicle, making whorls around her nipples, pressing up between her legs.

There’s no way that Sean, or Teresa, taught Kitty to do this. She’s been studying sound design herself. (She might have been testing it out on herself.) The sound waves—all crafted and put together out of Grey’s initial, near-innocent question about a band no one else here ever heard—are coalescing into a gentle back and forth, and then a less gentle back and forth pressure under and over those silver-grey panties.

It’s still hot. Grey feels herself sweating. It’s not uncomfortable any more but—

She leaves the cami on but takes the panties off and the difference is instant: every nerve ending, every cell in her clit, every fine fiber leading inside her, lights up. Her outer lips. Her inner lips. Again her inner lips.... thrush against them, as they wet themselves, and then inside them...

What are sound waves, after all, but vibrations? Kitty—and Grey, by speaking, by naming a singer—have turned the Danger Room into a vibrator, the biggest one Grey and Kitty have ever seen.

It might be one of the best. Grey manages to lift her hands—it’s like moving your hands and arms under deep water—to deflect some of the sound, to change the wave pattern, so that it slows down and moves up her body, and then back down, and then figure out how to send more sound waves…. inside her, without ever touching herself.

“Touch yourself,” Kitty says. “It’s like playing an instrument.” And then: “Pretend it's a theremin.” The only twentieth-century instrument human musicians could play without touching it; one whose sounds could be eerie, or scary, or sexy, depending on the melody and on whether a skilled player stayed in tune. 

There’s so much to miss, Grey thinks, hardly for the first time, and so much to love about this timeline, and so many people (not only this one friend) who care for her, at least sometimes, at least when she feels like she’s there for them—and there’s the feeling of freedom, the feeling that Grey won’t be punished, that Grey won’t instantly get her friends hurt, if she screws up once, if she speaks out of turn, if she makes the wrong sound, the feeling that she can pretend, that she can imagine herself elsewhere and then come back and she can still be here, here, here, here, here-- she notices her body again, comes back, comes back to the feeling the vibrations give her, outside her, inside her. She’s safe. She’s free. She can make any sound she wants, just here, where only Kitty can hear.

“I want you to play the room,” Kitty continues. “I love hearing you play. I’m accompanying you. I’m holding you in the room. You're my instrument. Play yourself. Play the room.”

Kitty realizes that her sentence could also have used a few more prepositions: “with” here, “with” there, what’s the difference? But Grey can’t keep track of the language any more, it’s all just sound, sweeping over her, pressing into her, leading her to cry out, softly, but not so soft that the super-echoes don’t start: her sounds of pleasure redouble into the room’s own resonating, stimulating effect. The more she enjoys what she gets to hear, the more sound she lets herself utter, the more she gets to hear. It’s like touching herself, but in an entirely new way: like hearing herself sing, except she’s never been able to sing this well, never been able to do _this_ to herself—

a new overtone makes Grey vibrate from the inside out; she’s her own resonator, now, the sound is all over, her cries are like hands, like Kitty’s hands, exploring, pressing harder, playing a chord, reaching up—

Grey arches suddenly, making a pure tone of pleasure, and the tone echoes around the room as she shudders, and after a minute or two the vibrations dim, slowly—Kitty must have her hands on the dials, turning them down (with one hand, probably) as she watches Grey come, and come again, and a third time, before the pleasure can diminish. (Do mutant girls come more often, or differently? Kitty has no idea; she's never gone all the way with a baseline human girl.) Grey wants to know exactly where Kitty’s other hand is at this point, the one not on a dial, and what she might be doing with it, but she’s in no position to ask: she says “Oh” and “I” and “oh,” quietly, and then “I” and “oo” and “y” and “you,” and possibly “Kitt-ee,” and then turns and curls on her side, on the cushiony floor, as the vibrations become a gentle massage.

Kitty takes her right hand off the dials and picks up a pen to make notes in the pages at the back of Advanced Sound Design for Medicine and Combat, the textbook she found in a desk last month; she’s been preparing for a while, and the equations involved are a serious thing. Kitty’s left hand is still between her own legs.

“I can come up,” Grey says, “or you came come down. Either way, I am so comfortable now. I’ll just take a minute first.” The sound of her speech does something extra to Kitty, too, who is on a hair trigger by now; she clutches at herself, says "oh," soft enough that a non-telepath might not hear, and smiles a bit; Kitty's body is not the centre of attention tonight. Grey closes her eyes with her own hand between her own legs, still wearing nothing but that now slightly stretched camisole. She was tired before, she thinks, but it was good to get that extra exercise. She wonders whether there’s a secure recording. She wonders what else she and Kitty might do with those sounds. There might be a new kind of music in the works.

Later on, in the rec room, when no one is watching: "Are we making a record?" Grey asks. "A pop hit?" she continues, knowing that Kitty's favourite songs have struck Grey as insipid, too sweet, or just old. "Maybe a 45?"

"I don't know," Kitty says. "I thought more like an extended play."

Grey slaps her friend, very lightly, and then takes her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Juliette Wreck's name is an homage to Julie Ruin, whose music, in this timeline, I strongly recommend.


	4. Knowing the Ropes

Among all the mutants who have ever been X-Men—and it’s a long list now, years and years after the death of Logan, the return of Cyclops, the tenth (or so) rebuild on the Xavier School—Illyana Rasputin may well be the one who got the least out of the Danger Room. It’s not like she needed a special training space in order to be on her guard all the time, both physically and psychically—her childhood took care of that. It’s not like her soulsword and soul armor could do anything to the machines, robots, projections or obstacles in a Danger Room session. Summoning the demons she commanded when she was Queen of Limbo was sometimes a good idea when fighting actual threats to the universe, or to her friends, but it wasn’t a skill she wanted to use in practice: each time it hurt. And her stepping discs—unlike Kurt’s methods of teleportation—got exponentially harder to control the closer the distances involved: she could always end a battle simulation by teleporting herself and her friends to New Orleans, and in fact she’s done just that, more than once, but it tends to anger whoever is running the session. Short-distance, combat-ready teleportation has long been something she wanted to learn, reliably, consistently: but it was hard enough that as an adult, she usually preferred to practice it by herself.

Or by herself with her wife keeping track, taking notes. Kitty being Kitty—and having an hour or so with no classes and no meetings and not much paperwork this morning—she wanted to run a scientific experiment involving Illyana’s powers.

“I want you to try to do this one without casting spells,” Kitty says through the control room’s mic. “Just physical agility and combat skills, and stepping discs if you can. But don’t let anything leave the room. Just move the projectiles from place to place. Do we need a word to stop the exercise if it gets too intense for us?”

That was Kitty’s plausible-deniability way to hint that the exercise might be more fun—if no less scientific—than, say, combat simulation with students. The last question, and then the giveaway: “us.”

“Also wear this if you can.” From the ceiling, on a thin metal cord, drops something that looks like a headset mic for a large stage, or maybe a TV appearance, the kind that Kitty and Sam sometimes do: ultra-thin, flexible and partly transparent, with double ear wires and an almost-invisible jawline.

The headset feels comfortable once it’s set in Illyana’s straight hair (“the only straight thing about you,” Kitty once said, till Illyana corrected her: “my aim”). It’s a good thing Illyana’s not in full costume—the headdress would definitely interfere. Instead she’s in running sweats. Made of unstable molecules. With tearaway portions at the arms and legs.

The room grows dim, then dark. Swamp lights appear, and clouds of fireflies, and tropical, tufted plants, some soft and inviting, some made of towering spikes. It’s familiar. It’s Monster Island. Kitty and Ilya made some good memories there.

Then the balls start falling: some fast, some in an almost cinematic slo-mo: balls and squares like hovering stereo speakers, and sound baffles the size of a tall woman’s head. Illyana has been practicing with the smallest possible distances, the smallest possible stepping discs: she manifests one the size of a kitchen sink around a ball the size of a grapefruit, and the ball reappears across the room. 

Another hard metal ball flies at her head: she manifests another stepping disc, even smaller this time, big enough for the ball, and the ball reappears in a far corner as melted slag. “Hot part of Limbo,” Illyana mutters.

“Keep going,” Kitty says. “None of these things are alive. You can’t hurt them. You’re practicing. You have this under your absolute control.”

That’s a sentence Ilya likes to hear. Now more balls are coming at her, and more squares—it’s as if she were besieged by a plate of stale waffles, and then by another plate. “Take that, waffles!” she says, for Kitty’s benefit, before manifesting a pair of stepping discs: the dangerous waffles reappear across the room, collide with each other, lose their momentum and sink. (Is there an unusual echo in here? Is the air getting thicker, or more humid?)

“And take that!” Illyana leaps over a rolling metal toaster-shaped robot, dodges a ball, teleports a kind of flying baseball bat out of the way.

The baseball bat never comes back. It’s likely in Limbo indefinitely. “Take that?” Kitty asks. “Didn’t they have Robbie Williams?”

When Illyana came back she claimed to want (she did not really want) to catch up on all the years of pop culture she missed: one of the running jokes that resulted had to do with boy bands, and Ilya had picked Robbie Williams as the boy she would remember to pretend to have a crush on. It became a running joke, the kind that the older generation of mutants—Jean, in particular—used to make about Sean Cassidy. No, not that Sean Cassidy.

“Take that!” Illyana shouted, ducking, grabbing a flying metal rod, and swinging it at another metal waffle.

“Just a few more minutes. You’ve got this. I’ve never seen you exercise so much control,” Kitty says. It’s something Ilya likes to hear. The Monster Island simulation, humid as it is, also makes her feel comfortable. Last time she was there she did good.

But it’s also exhausting. Can she manifest two stepping discs at once? Two axe-shaped things are coming right at her: she’d better. She does. The axes collide with each other, two meters behind her. One of them seems to be coated in moss.

Maybe a dozen more pieces of scrap metal fly out from all directions at the Russian mutant; she dodges, deflects, defeats them all. It’s a workout, like a workout at the gym, as well as a workout for her stepping discs. She’s never been able to focus them so well and so closely before. (It helps when your wife is watching. When she believes in you.)

“One more!” Kitty says, suddenly enthusiastic, and it’s—a mossy carpet? Illyana sidesteps the carpet, but the carpet—remote-controlled; Kitty must have built it using materials synthesis software, and recently, too—follows Illyana to land gently under her feet.

“Phase one of exercise concluded,” says—not Kitty, but the Danger Room’s official software voice (programmed to sound like Danger, by Danger, years back; the current Danger Room is of course not sentient—Danger sometimes checks to make sure).

Ad now Illyana—having kicked the asses of the various metal flying objects—can relax, as much as Illyana Rasputin can ever relax: there’s a mossy carpet with something like a throw pillow, made of linen leaves. The cooing dragonflies and singing beetles of Monster Island are harmonizing: the Danger Room has become a hot tropical night.

So hot that Illyana asks before she’s told. “Do I need these?” she asks, gesturing to her tearaway sweats. Then she rips off the legs, and the sleeves, without waiting for a reply. Her calves and the inside of her arms shine lightly with sweat from the workout, not unpleasantly: now she’s in short sleeves and loose shorts, black with silver trim, with boxers underneath. "Or this?" She yanks the headset out of her hair, off her jawline, and throws it far into the dark forest (across the room).

Light sweat from the tips of her bangs touches her forehead; the sweat from her hair, in the back, runs down her spine. It’s the kind of wet heat that can calm you down, can even make you feel clean; the closest the Danger Room gets, probably, to a sauna. (But Monster Island is still how it looks.)

The carpet fluffs up under Magik. It’s like something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There’s a cooling breeze, intermittent and welcome.

“Go ahead and relax,” Kitty says. “I’d like to watch you do some…. tests.” The control room is quite invisible with all the lianas and baobabs in the way, all the benign shadows of giant flightless birds, but Magik thinks she can hear something like a smile in her wife’s voice. And then it’s the voice of the Danger Room, mechanical and even: “Commencing phase two.”

Illyana can feel it right away: something snaps into place all around her, like a whole network of ropes, counterbalances, smooth, tight. They’re definitely not lasers, nor lights, and definitely not physical things like cables or fake vines, but there’s something there, though she can’t see it: should she go into high alert mode again—she can feel the adrenalin she’d use for that—or can she use that energy for something else?

Could she get up if she wanted to get up? She’s not quite prone; the carpet and the…. lines of force? have her sitting up, slightly, at an angle, like a hospital bed almost, but for someone who feels healthy.

Very healthy. Without clenching her first or forming her soulsword or returning to this-could-be-a-fight mode, Illyana reaches out with her bare left arm, shifts her weight to the right, and feels the lines of force move to support her. 

She’s really supported; it’s like some kind of 3-D invisible hammock. It’s…. exciting. Especially for someone who’s still got the adrenaline flowing; who has just killed a whole lot of flying metal antagonists; who has just worked out, and still has some stamina.

Then she looks up at where the control room must be, and stares. Kitty can surely see her. “Tell me how this works,” Illyana says, because she really wants to know. “Are you tying me up with invisible ropes?”

“Do you want to know, or do you want to find out?” Kitty asks, and then: “Truth or dare?”

“Dare,” Illyana replies, of course, and shifts her weight to the left, moving her right hand and wrist—still slightly sweaty, but cooling off now—over her stomach, her side, her hips.

It’s confusing at first, because Magik isn’t usually…. the one who’s tied up. That’s rare enough that Kitty would surely ask first: that kind of switch-up, the last time the two of them went there, was mostly a kind of rehearsal or trial so both of them could figure out more about what to do next time Illyana was on top. What (up there in the invisible control room) does Shadowcat have in mind?

And then Illyana figures it out: it’s not a top-bottom thing at all, though there’s definitely techniques involved, techniques designed for that sort of thing. It’s a spectator thing. Illyana has been wrapped up, suspended, connected to herself and to the room, by invisible ropes…. that she can learn to control. And the ropes can do things that a visible rope could not do.

She’s taking the lines of force—of invisible, non-magical, very tangible force, a whole cat’s-cradle’s worth of them—with her. It’s like catching yourself in a net; you can move yourself around and get to know yourself (your shoulders, your knees, your thighs) in a way that’s just totally different from standing or walking or running or swinging a sword or even wrestling playfully in bed. (She’s literally on top of the moss bed: she’s floating, suspended in air.) 

Is her wife still watching? Presumably yes. Surely yes.

Slowly but confidently, Illyana moves her right hand to her waistband, slips it inside, spreads her fingers so that her right thumb can touch her left inner thigh, her little finger her right thigh. The ring on her little finger, with its unusual metal, gets warm fast.

The lines of force follow her hand. (Is that a tiny knot? A pair of knots?) As she opens herself up inside her boxers, very slowly, the lines of force follow there too; they start to hum, the way ropes shake when you climb them, so that when she touches herself (and starts to hum, literally, too: she does make noises when she’s hot) she’s held again in a set of invisible ropes she can control to a fraction of a centimeter. And there are—bumps? knots? something semi-soft, something extraordinary, something pleasant, that she can unroll outside, and then inside her.

It’s really like plucking a harp: the motion she makes at the edge of herself, with all the lines of force crossing and gathering at her pressure points, lifting her up at her sides, growing softer around her breasts and shoulderblades, pressing in around her clit; it’s as if the ropes—not ropes but lines—not lines but traces, trajectories, something she’s never felt before—were holding her up (she thinks as she strokes, speeding up, up and down, very gradually) in ways that she can direct. 

It feels good: it feels so good. It feels like she’s moving her body through midair. The invisible ropes outline her shoulders, the edges of her breasts, the strength in her hips as she settles into them. Her lips part; she hums, a little bit. Just loud enough for Kitty to hear.

And here comes her tail. Bad idea to tie it in knots (that can hurt, for real) but she can grab the invisible lines of force with her tail and pull them from side to side: she can use her tail to shift her weight. She can rub the underside of the tip of her tail, very gently at first, against the knots the lines of force make where they intersect, coming closer to the knots themselves, moving back and forth over them—oh—that seems worth exploring at some length.

The tail gains length, a little, when it feels that good. She curls the tail back towards herself, keeping the tip up against the knots. Oh. Yes. That. (Kitty, are you watching? She must be watching.)

“All the ropes are yours to control. They’re all yours. Take them and do with them what you will.” Is that Kitty speaking, or is it just what Illyana wishes that Kitty would say?

And now she’s a kind of conductor, like an electrical conductor—the lines of force run right through her, crisscrossing—but also like an orchestra conductor: she can send her own bodily energy (there’s still sweat on her thighs, on her shoulders) left and right and up and down and back inside herself, she’s never had so much power over exactly how the parts inside her feel. And now her pink inner lips are opening up— she’s in midair—

and now she lets the matrix loose for a while, takes deep breaths, throws her head back and looks up again at the control room: “I dare you,” she manages to say to Kitty, “to explain what’s happening,” and then Illyana manages to shove her briefs all the way off her body (they don’t hit the floor, they’re suspended in the lines of force) and she moves her own two fingers, three fingers, down and inside and she’s lost the power of speech, she knows Kitty is watching, is Kitty recording?, she’d never record without permission, she must just be watching. She’s always liked to watch. Ilya loves Kitty, spectator; Kitty, the teacher; Kitty, the one who cares about her lover’s feelings so much that she takes notes….

All the arcs of space itself run through Illyana now: over her spine, around her ribs, into the places she doesn't want to keep secret anymore-- the places she wants to show Kitty-- and back into the warp and weft, the stretchy fabric, of the universe itself. That's how it feels, anyway. (It also feels.... she feels... she's being felt...) Maybe Kitty in the control room can see the lines ropes arcs knots bonds of holding that Illyana still can’t literally see. But she's got it all through proprioception, touch, sixth sense, seventh sense, ninth sense. She knows where her body is, where the ropes are. She can feel them. She can only feel and manipulate, she loves to manipulate them, she can send herself up, and up, until her back arches and all the lines converge, so far inside her she had never thought to go—

the knots loosen, Illyana a meter above the moss feels them as she says “oh,” and then “ah!” and then something in Russian that Kitty doesn’t understand at all (her Russian will never be perfect, and there are Siberian dialects), and Kitty’s beloved Ilya thrusts her own hand with its vibrations, its parabola of unseen and unseeable gentle forces, into herself, and then her tail, and her tail carries the lines of force with her, it’s like she’s riding herself and riding gravity at the same time, and Ilya bucks and contracts and cries out again until her thighs contract around her soaking wet hand, her tail-tip slides out, she keeps her legs together so hard, she relaxes onto the couch of moss, and closes her eyes, and feels the matrix, the unseen ropes, pulse through her, first fortissimo, and then a glissando, and then gently rolling away as the lines of force cradle her, let her turn sideways (her thighs still pleasurably contracted around her hand), and slowly deliver her to the moss blanket-carpet-pillow-floor.

And Ilya blinks and closes her eyes for real and when she opens them her Kitty’s there. In her own sweats and hoodie (an on-brand X-hoodie, of course, black and yellow as usual), her curls spilling out from the hood’s edge, bending down to kiss her. “I think,” she says, “we can call the experiment a success. Also, you always win at Truth or Dare.”

And Ilya has a disturbing thought: was the whole invisible-rope lines-of-force trick about a hidden telekinetic? Was Grey around, likely to pop out of some bulkhead and ask for her own chance? 

On another day that would be a welcome surprise. (It’s happened before.) Today, though, was all about Illyana’s absolute control of her environment, seen and unseen: a kind of rope bondage that wasn’t bondage at all: it was more like new freedom. Rachel Grey-Summers, standing by watching them too, would not be a welcome sight. Kitty wouldn’t do that. But Kitty has no telekinesis. If that wasn’t telekinesis by an actual, still-hidden-nearby telekinetic, Illyana asks, still sweaty, still out of breath a bit, hoping the moment’s not ruined, “what was it?”

And Kitty, being Kitty, tries to snuggle closer to her wife on the fluffy bed of artificial moss while showing Illyana a notebook. The first page contains a set of equations; the second a circuit diagram. The third looks more comprehensible to someone whose specialties are fights, demons, bodies and spellcasting: it’s a schematic of the Danger Room itself, with wiggly lines all over. 

“Can we do that again?” Kitty asks. Ilya nods, but then says “That depends. What was it?”

And now it's Professor Kitty, talking in bed (on a bed of moss). “The Danger Room,” Kitty says, “has all kinds of sensitivities built in to the motion and sound and body signatures of whoever is in it. That’s why it can respond to what you do. You can use these sensitivities to help robots or holograms fight back against our students—that is, the Danger Room can use them that way: the programs you already know how to run tell it how. Once it learns how somebody’s body works, it can get very good at sparring with you, through gadgets or through illusions of people.”

Illyana nods. “But the modern Danger Room can adapt the same force beams and sensitivities, not to fight against you, but to move with you. For that kind of adaptation to get comfortable the Danger Room needs a fresh memory of exactly how you move, in every direction, and what your body, right now, wants to do, including your facial expressions (that's what the headset does). It’s like tuning an instrument, except instead of a concert A.... concert Ilya.”

Illyana blinks: has she been played? should she have known how all this worked already? And then she realizes: she already knew how it worked. She just didn’t have the technical specifications. The lines, the knots, the ropes that intensified everything—

Kitty, being Kitty, was still speaking—“not the illusion of control; real control. When the room is fully operative in rope mode, you control every line of kinetic force in it, if the room is tuned to you. What you do with those lines of force, once you’re inside them—“

Illyana grabs Kitty by the shoulderblade, by the breast? Kitty remembers how they used to worry together about her developing breasts. llyana remembers those worries too. Both of them spent so long with their bodies not under their own control, not even in the way that baseline humans go through life controlling theirs. and now—

"Shut up, Kitty." At this point her Ilya did not have to add: "And kiss me." Just a peck, and then their bodies fit together better.

They’re held together, now, in the same lines of force. It’s like reclining together in an invisible hammock, but better. And still warm. And the lights of Monster Island, and the dragonfly songs, are still resonating around them.

They’re going to want to cuddle together again; maybe Illyana will want to rip Kitty’s sweats off. But not yet. Not yet.

“Race you to the ceiling,” Illyana says, realizing that the lines of force are vertical, some of them, and that they’re still there, some of them, and that some can be climbed.

“No fair,” Kitty says. “You already know the ropes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Japanese art of rope bondage is called Shibari, and it's not what Kitty and Magik are doing, but it's definitely an influence. And yes, I've ended up with another story in which Kitty and Magik are married adults at the school, some time years after current continuity: it will never not be fun to figure out what they get up to, once they can be happy together. (As always, if anything here conflicts with canon, I'd like to know.)


End file.
